Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in "Star Wars: A New Hope."
The “Star Wars” universe is full of memorable moments, but in the history of the franchise, there are few sequences as important as the final Death Star trench chase in “A New Hope.”
The newly released six-part Disney Plus streaming docuseries “Light & Magic” goes deep into the history of George Lucas’ San Francisco-based special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic, which was founded in 1975. The ending of the second episode explores the process behind the Death Star scene, in which the fate of the Rebel Alliance hangs on Luke Skywalker’s ability to speed his X-wing through a narrow trench and blast a thermal exhaust port that is only 2 meters wide.
In reality, the entire surface of the Death Star was a hand-built model that measured approximately 15 by 40 feet. Meticulous craftsmanship contributed to the verisimilitude, but the documentary reveals that the filmmaking techniques that made the scene feel so real are actually rooted outside the realm of special effects. It turns out that the entire sequence hinged on a model developed during an urban planning study at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s, which also happened to shape the future of San Francisco’s skyline.
George Lucas with a model of the Death Star.
“The Berkeley Experiment,” as it is referred to in the documentary, was funded by the National Science Foundation and led by urban planning professor Donald Appleyard at the school’s Environmental Simulation Lab. Completed in 1972, the project entailed building a small-scale model of Marin County and a computer-controlled stop-motion 16 mm camera system. The goal was to achieve a sense of realism as a model car traversed the miniature cityscape, in hopes that the technique could guide civic decision-making regarding construction choices.
“They wanted to do a perception study,” “Light & Magic” director Lawrence Kasdan told SFGATE. “They wanted to know if they showed film to people, and one of the films was totally artificial and miniaturized, had they successfully made it feel real? Was their physiological reaction different than when they saw actual footage from out of a car?”
One of the primary people behind the model was John Dykstra, who just a few years later went on to supervise the team behind the original “Star Wars.” Dykstra’s tenure at Industrial Light & Magic was short, but he would go on to work on dozens of blockbusters, from “Spider-Man 2” to “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” It turned out that the techniques he brought from his time at Berkeley were incredibly influential to the future of Lucas’ studio.
An archival photo of the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.
“That’s the basis for everything ILM has ever done. They want to make you feel you’re there,” Kasdan said. “John Dykstra wasn’t thinking about that when he was at Berkeley. He wasn’t thinking about how to solve this problem. But that turned out to be the ethos of Industrial Light & Magic for 40 years.”
Dykstra’s own description of the project sounds like a problem pulled from a photography textbook. The challenge at the time was to emulate human vision, so buildings far in the distance would still be in focus. That requires an extremely high f-stop, which thus demands an incredible amount of light to get an even exposure. If the miniatures were in focus but the background was blurred, the viewer would instinctively be able to tell something was wrong.
“It’s a dead giveaway that it’s a miniature,” Dykstra told SFGATE. “We were working on subliminal cues, which was the important part of this, to get a response from the viewer. We wanted to make it optically as real as possible.”
An archival photo of a model of Marin County in the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.
An archival photo of a model of Marin County in the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.
In the Berkeley lab, Dykstra and the rest of the team used a camera on a crane that functioned like an upside-down periscope. Controlled by a mainframe computer, it moved a fraction of an inch at a time. The goal was to make the viewer feel like the camera was traveling at 30 miles per hour, with each inch representing 30 feet. The camera was programmed to move in six motion directions: along the x-axis, y-axis and z-axis, plus pitch, jar and roll. Those programming techniques also played a part in making the Death Star sequence feel real.
“Roll is the thing that was actually perfected in ‘Star Wars,’” said Berkeley professor Peter C. Bosselmann, who served as the head of the simulation laboratory from 1976 to 2017. “It wasn’t all that necessary traveling on roads. [Roll] means you sort of tilt your head to one side as you would do in an airplane if you’re a pilot.”
Industrial Light & Magic took these ideas and applied them to a much larger scale, with a single foot of the model representing 40 miles. Given that a spaceship would theoretically be traveling at incredibly high speed, there would need to be motion blur to give the viewer a sense of velocity.
A blueprint of the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.
An archival photo of the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.
Once again, Dykstra thought back to his time at Berkeley and how the recordings they made of cars moving between buildings felt faster than those on the highway. For the Death Star scene to have a true sense of speed, Luke Skywalker couldn’t simply be flying above the space station. The solution to the problem clicked after some members of the Industrial Light & Magic team went on a recreational motorcycle trip in the desert, driving through deep gullies. Being surrounded by a towering peripheral landscape made everything feel more exciting.
“The reason the Death Star had trenches in it was because it was the only way we could achieve a sense of speed,” Dykstra said.
The Death Star surface took ILM model shop employee Lorne Peterson two months to build because of the detail required. Six hand-painted module molds were used for the surface, arranged randomly to create a sense of diversity and feel like a living cityscape. There were tens of thousands of little windows in the molds, each with retroreflective tape with glass beads that reflected the light. Originally, the windows were twice the size, until Lucas’ former wife Marcia, the film’s editor, stepped in and said to make them smaller.
Once the model was complete, filming of the epic conclusion of “A New Hope” took place in a parking lot. The team calculated that the camera would need to move at 20 miles per hour to achieve a sense of realism, something a motorized rig couldn’t accomplish.
A still from the iconic "trench run" scene during the climax of "Star Wars: A New Hope."
“The only way we could get the camera to a high-enough speed would be with a motorized vehicle, guerrilla filmmaking. Put the camera in the back of the truck,” Dykstra said in the Disney Plus docuseries.
The results are history, but the ripple effects of the Berkeley Experiment go far beyond “Episode IV.” A 1979 episode of the BBC’s “Tomorrow’s World” connects the dots, showing how further research at Berkeley helped guide San Francisco city planners. At the time, technology wasn’t refined enough to create 3D computer models, so a full-scale model of San Francisco was created.
One of the model’s first uses was by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to lobby for a 20-story limit on the height of new buildings. The proposal was in response to the potential construction of a 38-story Crocker National Bank tower in the Financial District. The proposal failed, resulting in the construction of what is now One Montgomery Tower and paving the way for other divisive high-rises like the Salesforce Tower.
So although that humble miniature cityscape created in a Berkeley lab did manage to save the galaxy from the Galactic Empire, it wasn’t quite as successful in saving the San Francisco skyline.
Dan Gentile is the culture editor at SFGATE. He moved to San Francisco from Austin, TX where he worked as a vinyl DJ and freelance writer covering food and music. His writing has been featured in Texas Monthly, American Way, Rolling Stone, Roads & Kingdoms, VICE, Thrillist and more. Email: Dan.Gentile@sfgate.com.